You did the hard part. You wrote your book. Now it's time to publish it. But what's this? Vendors want an ISBN from you. What even is that? Do you really need one? Where do you get it? ISBNs look kind of scary because they're so legal-ish and computer-y. And that...
You're converting your book into an eBook. It needs a cover installed. What dimensions should that eBook cover be? Here's a short answer: it should be 1400 pixels wide, and 2100 pixels tall. There you go. If you're happy with that, go get another cup of coffee and...
Amazon-KDP now only accepts the ePub format News flash: you can now view an ePub directly on your Kindle. No more side-loading. No more tears. Not a flash, really. Amazon was actually very quiet about this big announcement. How big is it? Big. Big like solving global...
You want to offer an eBook version of your book. How do you review it before you upload it for sale? Good news: you only need the ePub format for all major vendors now. Amazon used to insist on its own proprietary (and very inferior) MOBI format. But like the fickle...
You finished writing your book, and it's designed to perfection. (It isn't? Then let us help design your book.) You'd think uploading the interior PDF and the cover to Amazon's KDP service would be the easy part. It might be. But a lot of the questions they ask can be...
National Public Radio shared an interesting story about the redesigning of Helvetica. By far, Helvetica is used more often than any other face, so why redesign? Technical reasons, mostly to do with changing times. It's a great story, but not for here. Whew, what a...
Renaissance type designer Aldus Minutius You know what an italic font is. Bold type is simple enough to understand. Bold italic? Easy-peasy. But what if a font isn't any of those? If it's just straight-up normal, like the text you're reading right now? We book...
Book Designer Person asked you to provide a 300-dpi JPEG of your headshot. "Fine, right away" you say. You open your image editor and resize your lovey face using its export options, like this… …and you email her the resulting JPEG image. The next morning she writes...
"Mick" is Michael Campbell, a book designer, graphic artist and writer. His humor column, The Dumpster, closes every issue of Food & Spirits Magazine. Author of Are You Going To Eat That?, and the new 2017 book of seventy hilarious all new essays, Of Mice and Me.